Gifts: Prohibition, Disclosure, or Both?

One of the most contentious topics in local government ethics is prohibition vs. disclosure of gifts to officials. As with so many government ethics issues, the best answer is both, but reaching the best answer requires a thinking outside the box, along with a sincere interest in ending pay-to-play, in this case, the use of gifts as a way to reward officials for past or future conduct.

One example of such thinking outside the box comes from City Ethics' own Carla Miller, the Jacksonville ethics officer, and the city's ethics commission. The city had two laws on the books, one a prohibition provision, the other a disclosure provision. The former made the latter superfluous. And it also left open a loophole. Both were dealt with.

The prohibition was on gifts to officials from those doing business with the city, in an amount of $100 or more (such a prohibition should, by the way, be aggregate for the year, to prevent the loophole of restaurant tabs and other ways to give lots of smaller, regular gifts to officials). The disclosure requirement applied to gifts from non-relatives over $100. Since the most important of such gifts were already prohibited, there were almost no filings. The disclosure requirement did nothing. So it was removed, leaving nothing but a prohibition.

But the prohibition left open a loophole I hadn't thought of:  a gift in any amount could be given to the city, and then the city (that is, city officials) could, without prohibition or disclosure, turn all or part of the gift over to one or more officials, including themselves. Miller recognized this, and now disclosure is required of gifts to the city and the names of anyone to whom the gifts are turned over. The disclosure is put online. This just went into effect, so there's only one month's disclosure up on the site.

Info about this is thanks to a blog post yesterday on jaxpoliticsonline.com.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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